For Journalists

News from the Broad

The Broad Institute is committed to open sharing not only of its scientific data and tools, but also information and news about our progress towards achieving our mission. Below are just a few highlights from the Broad scientific community.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have expanded their collaboration with Bayer HealthCare to include cardiovascular genomics and drug discovery. The goal of this new part of the alliance is to leverage insights from human genetics to help create new cardiovascular therapies.

One of the primary limitations to the effectiveness of cancer therapeutics is drug resistance. This month in the journal Cell, Broad researchers Rick Wilson, Levi Garraway, and colleagues describe their work unraveling drug resistance mechanisms for ALK tyrosine kinase inhibitors in ALK-dependent non-small cell lung cancers. They screened nearly 16,000 ORFs corresponding to over 12,000 genes, identifying a range of known mechanisms able to confer resistance to ALK inhibitors, along with new ones including purinergic P2Y receptors (G-protein coupled receptors) acting through Protein Kinase C signaling.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has entered into a partnership with Calico around the biology and genetics of aging and early-stage drug discovery. The partnership will support several efforts at the Broad to advance the understanding of age-related diseases and to propel the translation of these findings into new therapeutics.

Scientists studying the human gut microbiome often analyze stool to measure what’s living in the gut. However, they were uncertain how well those samples represented the microbial make-up of the intestine. Reporting in Cell Host & Microbe, a team led by Curtis Huttenhower and Xochitl Morgan of the Broad Institute and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health used 16S sequencing to compare the microbial composition in stool with that found in the intestines of rhesus macaques. The team discovered that microbial communities found in feces correlated highly with those found in the large intestines and moderately with those of the small intestines, supporting the use of stool in microbiome studies.

The origins of Indo-European languages (which include English, Greek, Russian, Italian, Farsi, and Hindi, among others) are a subject of debate among linguists. Some think early Anatolian farmers introduced the languages to Europe during the Early Neolithic period. Others think the shift happened later and came from the steppe in modern Ukraine and southern Russia. Researchers led by Broad senior associate member David Reich sequenced the DNA of 69 ancient Europeans to reveal that an early German population shared 75 percent of its ancestry with a population of Russian steppe herders that lived 500 to 1,000 years before them. The results suggest a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from the eastern periphery around 4,500 years ago and lend new support for the steppe hypothesis. You can read the team’s study in Nature and learn more in stories from the BBC and Al Jazeera America to learn more.